On Tue, 11 May 2021 at 00:24, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 10:20:37AM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote: > > > it was. So it's not so much "we should flip to avoid a bitrotting > > dependency" as it is "asciidoctor is arguably nicer" or "it's the way > > forward". > > I'm OK with those arguments, too. :) Excellent. :) > > When we looked at xmlto-less rendering around two years ago [1], we > > found various asciidoctor bugs up to and around version 2.0. We would > > likely need to require some >=2.0.x. The exact requirements will > > probably only become clear when someone really does the work. > > That does make things a little less convenient; Debian stable, for > instance, still has 1.5.8. It's not too hard to install an updated gem, > but not quite as nice as using the system package (it also makes things > weird for building the stable Debian package itself, which would want to > rely only on other packages; but of course any proposed change to the > doc toolchain would be for new versions, and would not get backported > there anyway). Right. And 1.5.8 is perfectly fine for ascidoctor *with* xmlto, i.e., as long as we're discussing moving away from asciidoc, not moving away from xmlto entirely. And soon enough, Debian stable should be at 2.12. ;-) (I realize Debian stable was just an example.) > > I think what I'm arguing for is > > > > 1) switch the default to asciidoctor, > > 2) enable optionally using it without xmlto, > > 3) figure out what broke and fix it, and document which is the minimum > > asciidoctor version we're going to bother with for (2), > > 4) lather, rinse, repeat (3), > > 5) switch the default to not using xmlto, > > 6) drop the xmlto way of generating the manpages(?). > > I'm unclear when support for python asciidoc goes away here. Is it part > of step 6 (because it does not have another way of generating them)? Or > does it live on forever as a non-default legacy system? I'd prefer not, > but as long as we are clear about the primary target and leave it up to > people interested in the legacy to do the compat fixes, that might be > OK. I think I meant it to happen somewhere in step 3 or 4, I just didn't call it out. If it happens super-early in step 3, that would perhaps be a bit unfortunate. But if fixing up the last few bits of xmlto-vs-no-xmlto with asciidoctor involves giving up on asciidoc, then so be it... If nothing else, we might all of a sudden find that our asciidoc-processed docs look awful and that nobody seems to have noticed. Martin
